DEL.ICIO.USUpdated: 4:27 p.m. October 02, 2008
Witness describes gunpoint encounter with Nichols
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Iman Adan fled a civil war in Somalia as a child but she never feared getting shot until confronted by Brian Nichols.
Nichols accosted her at gunpoint in her apartment building near Lenox Mall, trailing her from the gym after she finished working out about 10 p.m., just hours after the Fulton County Courthouse shooting, Adan testified Thursday at Nichols’ murder trial.
HYOSUB SHIN / hshin@ajc.com
Chico Robinson is questioned Thursday by prosecutor Brett Pinion.
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She said Nichols was wearing a hat and red jacket — clothing that was different from what witnesses had described him wearing as he fled downtown Atlanta earlier that day.
“Before he took his hat off, he said ‘Do you know me?’” said Adan, who didn’t recognize him. “Then he took his hat off and said, ‘How about now?’ And I remembered the picture I saw at the gym.”
“He said, ‘I’m Brian Nichols — I’m the guy on TV. I don’t want to hurt you. I just need a place to hide for a few days.”
Adan, who was 23 at the time, said Nichols then said something she found strange.
“He said the police and everybody have a war on me,” said the Somali immigrant whose image of war was of opposing armies.
For Nichols’ attorneys, Adan’s testimony about “a war” provided the first handhold for their insanity defense during the nine-day-old death-penalty trial.
Nichols, who has admitted killing a judge, a court reporter and a deputy sheriff at the courthouse on March 11, 2005, plusanother man later during a robbery, claims delusions caused him to see himself as a “soldier” in a armed struggle against the justice system that he viewed as unfair to blacks.
Adan told Robert McGlasson, a defense attorney, that he was the first investigator to inquire about Nichols’ war comment.
“I didn’t understand what he meant about a war,” she said.
But she said on that day three and a half years ago that she feared Nichols would kill her and her boyfriend, Shelton Warren, who lived with her in her apartment at the Summit at Lenox.
Warren testified that when he opened the apartment door, he didn’t immediately see the gun, which Nichols had stuck in Adan’s back.
“When he said, ‘Don’t try nothing,’ I looked at him again and I realized this was the person I saw on TV.”
Adan said Nichols wanted to use the apartment. Warren said he pushed his girlfriend inside and started to wrestle with Nichols.
“Lock the door,” he said he shouted at Adan who was then picking herself up off the floor. He said as he turned back around to fight after Adan barricaded herself in the apartment, Nichols pistol-whipped him but didn’t try to shoot him.
“We were just standing there, and he turned and went down the hallway,” Warren testified.
Inside the apartment, he could hear a hysterical Adan talking to a 911 operator. The tape of the call, played in Superior Court Thursday, chillingly evoked Adan’s wailing and fear: she was so afraid she wouldn’t check on her boyfriend.
Nichols could hear Adan calling police, Warren said. “If I heard it, he heard it,” Warren said.
She made the call at 10:18 p.m. Police arrived at 10:25 pm.
Warren said police didn’t seem to believe him when he said he had been fighting Nichols. According to prosecutors, later that evening, Nichols would kill David Wilhelm, an off-duty federal agent, who was laying tile at the house he was renovating, bout 10 minutes away from the apartment by foot.
The manhunt for Nichols had started about 9 a.m. that day but Thursday’s testimony revealed a confused and overwhelmed police department that overlooked witnesses and evidence that would have told them Nichols had escaped downtown Atlanta by taking a MARTA train toward Buckhead.
After Nichols escaped from his holding cell on March 11, 2005, he allegedly killed Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, who was presiding over Nichols’ rape trial, and his court reporter, Julie Ann Brandau, in courtroom 8H, He’s also accused of gunning down Deputy Hoyt Teasley on a street outside the courthouse about 9:05 a.m. that day.
For hours, scores of police officers searched in vain for a green Honda Accord that Nichols had purportedly hijacked in a CNN Center parking garage when they should have known that Nichols had left the garage on foot, according to today’s testimony.
Chico Robinson, senior investigator for CNN security, testified he had viewed a surveillance tape of Nichols leaving the garage by a stairwell almost immediately after the time established by another man, who testified that Nichols tried to carjack him in the garage at 9:15 a.m.
Robinson said he gave Atlanta Police a copy of the tape 30 minutes after the attack. At 9:57 a.m. Nichols walked through the Five Points MARTA Station and boarded a train headed toward Buckhead, according to the time stamp on a surveillance camera.
Michal Taylor, an interior designer, said she boarded an empty MARTA train at the station about 10: a.m. to go to Midtown. A moment later, Nichols also boarded the car and sat rigidly, staring at her, Taylor said. She noticed him because he was wearing a suit jacket without a shirt, black tennis shoes without shoelaces and “he was sweating profusely” despite the nippy weather.
“He was watching me and I was watching him,” she said. “I didn’t know what he had done, but I was very afraid of him because he was sweating.”
She said the man stayed on the train when she exited at Midtown less than 10 minutes later. By 10: 30 a.m., she said she knew from media reports the man was Nichols, and she called police.
She said she couldn’t get through to a 911 operator for three hours and then she was transferred to a call center because of the high volume of 911 calls. No investigator interviewed her even by phone until the next day, when she was finally able to give a description of the man she identified as Nichols.
By the time she spoke to the police, however, Nichols was suspected of killing David Wilhelm, a U.S. Customs’ agent, whose body had been found by carpenters on March 12. Nichols surrendered to police later that day.
“He was already captured on television before somebody talked to me,” she said.
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